I expect we've all got mates in bands that we'd love to be instrumental in bringing to wider attention, so please contribute to this thread and of course check out the music listed if you get a chance. Should any music bods like any of the below and want a CD / to book them / to give them a multi-million pound record deal etc and don't have any luck contacting them through MySpace, feel free to message me.

So in descending order of relevance to this board:

My brother, James Conder's afro-influenced Birmingham based group, the Lazy Lizards, who alas are no more following Jim's recent move to Vietnam (great timing I know!) but a lot of you might enjoy. I sent a copy to Charlie who found Jim's voice a bit too Richard Thompson-esque but enjoyed the music and is a MySpace friend. My parents, bless them, put on a gig in their Somerset village of Spaxton and put the tagline on the poster: 'World Music from Birmingham / Spaxton'.

And for something a bit less rootsy, the sound of 20th Century computer games melded into indie rock, or as their page puts it, 'The Strokes bumping into Sonic Youth on your old SNES' - the Midi Midis.

Somebody once said "There's only one band in Hackney and everybody's in it." Someone should do a family tree of Hackney bands of the last 20 years. Pete and Pinball Geoff would be in more than half of them, I'm convinced.

Pete Bennett also does a neat line in hand made valve harmonica amps and programs the Stoke Newington Fringe Festival.